Leidos and Elroy Air “to Show Off Autonomous Aerial Resupply Drone for U.S Marine Corps”

Lei­dos, a glob­al sys­tems inte­gra­tor in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy and engi­neer­ing and Elroy Air, a U.S‑based autonomous air­craft and soft­ware devel­op­ment com­pa­ny, are demon­strat­ing an autonomous Medi­um Aer­i­al Resup­ply Vehi­cle – Expe­di­tionary Logis­tics (MARV-EL) pro­to­type for the Navy and Marine Small Tac­ti­cal Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems pro­gram office (PMA-263), reports a press release. These flight tri­als are sched­uled for July.

The devel­op­ment and test­ing is part of a con­tract award­ed last year to devel­op and demon­strate an uncrewed air­craft sys­tem that can autonomous­ly resup­ply for­ward-deployed ground forces for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Tim Free­man, Lei­dos Senior VP and Air­borne Sys­tems Busi­ness Area Man­ag­er, com­ment­ed, “We are pleased to team with Elroy Air to bring this impor­tant capa­bil­i­ty to the warfight­er. Gain­ing tri­al approval is a major mile­stone and is the result of months of hard work.”

He con­tin­ued, “We look for­ward to demon­strat­ing how the Lei­dos and Elroy Air MARV-EL solu­tion can help deliv­er a logis­tics advan­tage to the Marines and oth­er branch­es of the mil­i­tary.”

Bris­tow secures ear­ly deliv­ery for five Elroy Air Chap­ar­ral air­craft

The part­ners will demon­strate Elroy Air’s Chap­ar­ral sys­tem at the U.S. Army Yuma Prov­ing Ground in Ari­zona. “The Chap­ar­ral is a ‘lift-plus-cruise’ hybrid-elec­tric ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing (hVTOL) car­go air­craft,” explains the release. “The Chap­ar­ral sys­tem lever­ages the ben­e­fits of wing-borne flight dri­ven by elec­tric propul­sion and tur­bo-gen­er­a­tion for effi­cient autonomous oper­a­tions and longer-range mis­sions.” 

And goes on, “It is designed with an advanced car­bon com­pos­ite air­frame and mod­u­lar auto­mat­ed pay­load capa­bil­i­ties to help reduce the per­son­nel required ver­sus lega­cy air­craft and enable zero-touch logis­tics.”

Elroy Air CEO and co-Founder Dave Mer­rill, remarked, “We’ve been design­ing Chap­ar­ral from the begin­ning to move car­go and resup­ply troops in the bat­tle-space with­out putting crews in harm’s way. We look for­ward to demon­strat­ing these capa­bil­i­ties and work­ing toward serv­ing the U.S. Marine Corps’ goals for expe­di­tionary logis­tics.”

For more infor­ma­tion

www.leidos.com

elroyair.com

(Top image: Elroy Air)

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